The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for entering musical data directly using audio input, and more particularly to the creation of an audio composition from acoustic information sung into a microphone by a composer.
Composers have traditionally created musical compositions by having several musicians learn the various parts of the composition according to the composer's instructions, and then play all the instruments simultaneously to produce the composition. Changes to the composition were time consuming and difficult, often requiring successive performances of the entire composition. Multi-track recording techniques allowed composers to record each musical part independently, and to superimpose each instrument's part onto a master recording. This technique allowed, among other things, a composer to play each instrument himself or herself, and to change individual tracks without having to re-generate the other parts. Early multi-track recording typically involved an elaborate sound recording facility. More recently, digital audio techniques have simplified the composer's task.
Music that is played on an instrument or heard with the ear is in an analog form. This analog form may be converted into a digital form, often with no loss of fidelity because the digital sampling rate, can be much higher than the highest frequency the human ear can hear. Once in digital form, the music may be manipulated or transformed in a variety of ways. For example, it may be compressed so that a long audio piece may be transmitted to another destination in a short period of time, and then expanded to reproduce the original audio sound, or, the pitch or other characteristics of the audio signal may be changed. Digital techniques may also be used to store audio information from various sources and then combine them to form a composition, similar to a multi-track tape recorder.
Modern day composers typically use a music keyboard or similar device to enter music into a digital audio device, such as a computer or digital mixing board, using traditional piano-playing techniques. Some keyboards can be configured to mimic various standard musical instruments, such as a flute or piano, allowing the composer to compose a piece without the need for the actual musical instrument, and without even needing to know how to play a particular musical instrument, as long as the composer can enter the desired notes through the keyboard. Unfortunately, entering notes through a keyboard often does not provide the audio complexity a composer would like to achieve. The mechanical gestures involved with entering notes on a keyboard or other input device, such as a wind controller, guitar controller, or percussion controller, typically do not capture the auxiliary information associated with a particular note. For example, there is no intuitive way to perform a tremolo via a piano-type music keyboard. Typically, this sort of information is added later in the compositional process, after the initial note entry.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide an integrated compositional device that could produce a musical composition using a composer's voice as a unified input for entering notes and associated auxiliary information. It would be further desirable that such a device could be portable to allow compositions to be created in any location the composer chose, and that the device could play the compositions back, so that the composer could listen to and subsequently modify the compositions.